BY JUDY ROHRER This past Fourth of July weekend was one of the hottest in history, not just because of climate catastrophe but also the white-hot imperialist racism “born in the U.S.A.” The scorching weekend started with the Supreme Court’s denial of historical and ongoing US settler-colonial and racial structural violence in its decision to…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY In the wake of last month’s horrific Supreme Court decision overturning affirmative action, an organization called Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR) filed a federal civil rights complaint against Harvard University, challenging their legacy admissions policy. As LCR litigation fellow Michael Kippins put it in a press release on their website: Harvard’s practice…
BY NORRIS M. HAYNES The US Supreme Court has recently ruled that colleges and universities can no longer use race as a factor in college admissions. This ruling was the result of a specific challenge to admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. In their complaint, the plaintiffs, an organization called…
BY MARK S. JAMES In section II of his concurring opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Justice Clarence Thomas seems to suggest that affirmative action can be justified for elite colleges and universities, such as Harvard and the University of North Carolina, if they can explain how their past discriminatory treatment against people…
BY MARK S. JAMES One of the most discussed passages from the Supreme Court’s majority opinion on affirmative action comes at the very end. It reads: At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality…
BY JENNIFER RUTH My colleague on various AAUP committees, Dr. Derryn Moten, emailed me and others today on the occasion of the ruling. His words offer perspective that someone like John Roberts is incapable of contributing and I asked if I could share the email on the blog. He begins with a quote from the…
BY HANK REICHMAN As we today observe a Juneteenth holiday, celebrating the end of slavery in its final redoubt of Texas on June 19, 1865, a commemoration that has gained extra salience and expanded recognition in the context of the extraordinary and continuing cross-racial upsurge of the Black Lives Matter movement, those in higher education…
BY AARON BARLOW Fortunately for me, I teach on a campus where diversity is the norm. New York City College of Technology (one of the campuses of the City University of New York) is 33% Hispanic, 30% Black (non-Hispanic), 20% Asian and 11% White (non-Hispanic). The reversal of Obama-era Affirmative Action guidelines, clearly, is not…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH One of the neologisms related to the Trump administration with the most pernicious implications may be the phrase “task traitor.” It refers to the appointment of cabinet secretaries and other executive officers who have a deep-seated antipathy toward the departments and agencies that that are being appointed to head. Although I…
BY NEAL H. HUTCHENS Today, Neal H. Hutchens, member of the AAUP Litigation Committee and professor of Higher Education at the University of Mississippi, published this column in Hechinger Report: Last week, the idea of a potential move by the U.S. Department of Justice received swift pushback from supporters of affirmative action in higher education,…